Team USA’s Olympic basketball roster came together a little over a month ago, a fact made obvious by their play in Rio. They struggled through the group stages, fought for a tough victory in the semifinal against Spain and looked to be in for a dogfight against Serbia in the gold-medal game.
Olympic basketball scores 2016: Team USA saved their best for last
It took them the whole tournament, but USA Basketball finally came together.
Team USA wasn’t content to struggle through another close game, and they closed out the 2016 Olympics in style.
It’s easy to suggest a glorified All-Star team should just walk over their opponents, but in practice it’s a lot more complicated. Team USA faced off with teams that have been together for years in Rio, equipped with a group of guys only just getting acquainted with one another. Talent alone was never going to be enough against teams like Spain, war-tested across a decade of international play.
There were games when you had to wonder if Team USA would ever be able to put it all together. Even when the Americans were beating up on China to start the tournament, reliable players like Klay Thompson couldn’t hit water from a boat. As Thompson picked up his play in subsequent games, the defense cratered.
All the concerns finally melted away in the gold-medal game. It helped to get a superlative performance from Kevin Durant, who put the team on his back with a record-tying 30 points in the final. When the best player in the tournament played like it, no one was going to stand a chance against Team USA.
It was the work on the other end, however, that birthed Team USA’s best performance.
After some early bickering over defensive rotations between Thompson and DeAndre Jordan, an altered lineup featuring Jimmy Butler, Paul George and Kyle Lowry harassed Serbia’s ball handlers, creating a series of turnovers that led to easy buckets for Team USA. Seeing Lowry and George dive for loose balls and create extra possessions out of nothing was a far cry from the team’s apathy in group play. The urgency against Serbia finally matched Team USA’s considerable talent, which was all they ever needed.
A sense of community and brotherhood was present at the end. Carmelo Anthony needed a couple rebounds to surpass Team USA’s individual rebounding record in Olympic play, and his teammates roared from the bench when he set the mark late in the game. The game was long out of reach, but the players and coaches hugged him as if the record was just as important.
That togetherness was the base for Team USA’s best performance in Rio, and it couldn’t have come at a better time.
3 Things We Learned
Spain and Australia were both worthy of medals
Andrew Bogut was Australia’s best hope at stopping Spain’s big men from dominating in the paint. He fouled out of the bronze medal game with just under eight minutes remaining in the third quarter. Somehow, the Aussies hung around anyway.
Pau Gasol and Nikola Mirotic were already cooking before Bogut was removed from the festivities, and it only got worse from there. Spain went to Gasol over and over again, using him as a sure-handed roll man and an offensive hub out of the high post. He punished weaknesses all over the Australian defense in a vintage performance, finding open shooters or scoring himself on what felt like half of Spain’s possessions.
Australia was quite obviously unequipped to deal with a loss of that magnitude, but a heroic offensive performance from Patty Mills kept them alive long enough to have a shot. He poured in 30 points, and was the obvious target on Australia’s final play that turned into a disjointed mess.
The final shot of both teams is an image sure to last, one basking in the elation of victory, while the other wanders aimlessly imagining what could have been:
Sam Amick / USA Today
Australia fell short, but they proved themselves more than worthy in this tournament. If not for a questionable call that earned Spain the winning points, they’d be returning home with their first ever medal in basketball.
For the Spanish, an era of international basketball likely comes to a close. Gasol will be 40 by the time the 2020 Olympics roll around, and it would be hard to top a 31-point, 11-rebound performance in your final game. Spain never managed to oust Team USA at the top, but they can be proud of this successful era of hoops.
Team USA is good enough without their best
Steph Curry, LeBron James and several others stayed home in 2016, preferring to rest rather than to chase another gold medal. Team USA was good enough to win without them.
This is an idea most already believed, but it was challenged several times throughout this tournament. If Serbia gets one more shot to fall in group play or Anthony doesn’t bail them out of some atrocious early performances, perhaps we’d need to re-evaluate whether that was ever true.
Results can’t completely overtake the process, however. The gap between Team USA and the competition shrunk compared to previous Olympics, and the program’s humbling in 2004 is always there as a reminder of what happens when America doesn’t take the competition seriously enough.
Talent is on the way to help other counties. Ben Simmons and Dante Exum will bolster Australia, Dragan Bender will likely join the upstart Croatians, and a mix of other countries not currently in the picture may galvanize behind their top talents (see: Canada and Andrew Wiggins). Basketball is a global sport, and even if America has the most talent, it has to value the top spot in order to keep it.
The NBA season can’t get here soon enough
Getting an extra dose of basketball in August has been a treat for the last few weeks, a rare life preserver for American hoops fans who are usually stuck with nothing but baseball at this point in the summer. The Rio Olympics helped to bridge the gap between free agency and training camp, and previews of some upcoming NBA storylines were put on full display.
Durant’s spot in the middle of a super-team was an appetizer for his first season with the Warriors, but there were non-stars worth attention as well. Andrew Bogut showed he still has some tricks left in the bag to bring to the Mavericks, and the Sixers have to be excited about performances from new (Dario Saric) and old (Sergio Rodriguez) faces set to join their rebuilding project.
Now that the Olympics have come to a close, it’s time to settle in and prepare for NBA preseason. Treasure the fact that our break from basketball was a lot shorter than usual.
Final Scores
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